A Mandate for Israel

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Two years after the ratification of the U.N. Charter in 1945, the General Assembly and Secretary-General Trygve Lie created a special committee of 11 ambassadors to decide the future of Palestine with respect to the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people displaced during the Holocaust. The committee recommended that after a transition period of two years, Palestine would be "constituted into an independent Arab state, an independent Jewish state and the (International) City of Jerusalem," remaining "within an economic union." In 1948 the Jewish state was created after much opposition in the Arab states and disagreement within the U.S. government, a conflict that continues to plague that region of the Middle East to this day.